The Last Straw
by Hawki
Summary: Oneshot: When the world is burning around you, should you take what victories you can get? Maybe. Doesn't change how screwed everything is though.


**The Last Straw**

The year was 2050, which meant that by scientific consensus, there was now more plastic in the oceans than fish.

Of course, Gi reflected, as she sat in the lab of the _New Andaman_, scientific consensus didn't seem to count for much these days. Speak out about "scientific consensus," and you'd be labelled a stooge for the UN. Speak about the "scientific consensus" of climate change, or defaunation, or ocean acidification, or insect collapse, or any other issue, and you'd be branded everything from a socialist to a hysteric. Point out that the Arctic no longer had ice in summer, or that global temperatures were already 2 degrees above pre-industrial times, and then you'd get the answer of "so what?" Or at least from the people who had the money to escape the worst of the impacts of a warming world.

It was part of why she found being in the lab of the ship bearable. She was in the company of people who knew how screwed the world really was, and were still trying to make it better, even at this point it was like applying a band-aid to a bullet wound. Here, she was far away from the people who'd been content to let the world burn if it meant they got to live in continued luxury. Here, she was away from her old friends. People who she could look at and see the despair in their eyes. The same despair in hers as she studied the latest sample of phytoplankton. As with every other sample, their bodies were flooded with microplastics. She tapped her right forefinger against the desk, while with her left hand, she adjusted the dial of the microscope. Not the most sophisticated technology in the world, but it got the job done.

"Hey."

And speaking of jobs being done, she knew she'd have to put her own on hold as Suranook walked in. She leant back against her chair and put her glasses on.

"Seen the news?" he asked.

"Most of what I see are micro-bugs," Gi murmured.

He shrugged and pressed a button on his omni-wrist. Her own pinged. "Check it out."

Gi frowned. She remembered when the Internet had been a novelty. When smart phones and iPads had been the next big thing. She knew how to use the OW, didn't mean she enjoyed it. Nevertheless, she activated her own and the screen displayed a hologram.

"Great Pacific Clean-up now in its twenty-fifth year," she read. "Last haul estimated at fifty-eight megatons of plastic waste." She looked up from the screen and at the twenty-something year old who was smiling at her. "And?" she asked.

The smile faded. "Thought you might like some good news."

"Good news," she murmured. She deactivated her pad and tapped the microscope. "I'm studying the effects of microplastics on phytoplankton. There's more plastic in the ocean than fish. You think I'm going to be overjoyed that the world is slightly less screwed than I thought it was five minutes ago?"

Suranook didn't say anything. He just stood there, lingering in place. She felt sympathetic for him, but didn't have the will to say anything else.

People like Suranook Bureneeo had been born in the 2020s. For them, the world they lived in was the world as it had always been. A world where his own country of Indonesia was fighting a war with Malaysia over Borneo. A world where Australia had expanded its mining to the Antarctic. A world where Bangladesh was being flooded, while India and Pakistan were in a state of permanent water crisis. Where Russia, China, and the United States were on the brink of war over access to oil reserves in the Arctic. Where the Amazon was turning into savanna, where the Middle-east was now little more than a series of failed states ruled by warlords, and where Africa wasn't faring much better. She knew that she couldn't attribute everything there to a dying world, but still, she'd been born into one that had seen the end of the Cold War, and the creation of new nations after the USSR had collapsed. Suranook had been born in one where nations that she'd known no longer existed. Micronesia. Tuvalu. The Marshall Islands. Kiribati. Islands and nations that no longer existed because the sea had swallowed them up.

"Gi?"

She wondered if Hope Island was still above the waves. Probably. Still, she hadn't been there in decades, and if any of her old friends had, they hadn't told her.

"Gi?"

She looked at Suranook. "What?"

He pointed at her right finger. "You're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"Your tell." He was smiling again. "You always tap your right forefinger when you're worried."

Gi frowned. "I am _not _worried."

"Sure, sure. But you're doing it."

She looked at her right hand. Her finger had gone still again. But she didn't doubt what Suranook had told her.

"Anyway," he said. "See you around."

She grunted, and let him head out. Sighing, she leant back in her chair and took the ring off her finger, holding it in the air before her. A ring that had been gifted to her by the Spirit of the Earth. A ring that still worked, but was effectively useless. Power over water wouldn't decrease the amount of plastic that clogged Earth's seas. It wouldn't de-acidify them, or remove the excess heat from them, or restore life to the world's dead zones. She could manipulate water, but couldn't cause it to change form, so she couldn't bring back the world's glaciers or sea ice. And water wouldn't restore Earth's fisheries either. In its day, power over water had helped her save the Earth from everyone from the likes of Hoggish Greedly to Zarm. None of that however had helped her save it from mankind itself. Population, consumption, deforestation, and every other ill that blighted the planet had only gone one way – up. And even as Kwame worked on Africa's Green Wall, as Linka and Wheeler tried to get their countries to come to their senses, as Ma-Ti tried to rally hearts and minds (literally), she knew it was too late. Perhaps it had always been too late. There was a reason why Suranook didn't recognise her, or the ring she carried. No-one remembered the past in this world when so many people were trying to survive the present, while a select few made grand promises about the future.

She opened her drawer and took it out. A pink, plastic straw. The last straw, she liked to call it. Potentially the last one left in the world, as they were all phased out by 2029 and replaced with bamboo and aluminium variants. That point when the world congratulated itself even as the planet continued to burn, and temperatures reached 1.5 degrees. Because even if the planet's ecosystems were collapsing, the world had managed to ban damn _straws_.

With a sigh, she got back to work.


End file.
